They line up in front of a courthouse in southeastern France, from morning to evening, and have gathered in the thousands in cities across the country. They hold signs reading, “one rape every six minutes,” “not all men but always a man,” and “giving in is not consenting.”

They chant: “Rapist we see you, victim we believe you.”

Women across France are rallying in support of Gisèle Pelicot, a 72-year-old reluctant icon whose husband is on trial in the city of Avignon for systematically drugging her and inviting dozens of men, 50 of whom are now his co-defendants, into their home to rape her over nearly a decade.

The shocking case has sparked what many women in France call a long-overdue reckoning over “rape culture” and systemic sexism in the way the judicial system handles sexual violence.

  • parrhesia
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    3 months ago

    Husband aside, that’s 50 separate people who thought this was okay. Ffs

    • Ifera@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Allegedly, they didn’t. Multiple men were contacted through a swingers website, and allegedly led to believe she was a willing participant pretending to be asleep, instead of what she really was, the victim of a disgusting monster, drugged and undressed without her knowledge, for the pleasure of a sick monster.

      To the point where one of her abusers, fully aware of what he did, wrote to her to apologize from jail, realizing what he had done under false pretenses, and aware that by not doing his due diligence, he raped her in the literal sense of the word.

      • parrhesia
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        3 months ago

        I would hope that one that would be interested in this type of stuff would be meeting the affected party first :/

        • Ifera@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          So would I, and I also wish nobody did meth. A lot of dangerous things have been normalized by many people, to the point where they get so used to them, that they seem normal and relatively harmless to them, only because their “normal” is so fucking far from the socially acceptable normal.